Paul Aronsohn was present at Alexandra Harwin’s campaign launch party at the tennis club earlier this year and has literally sat by her side at campaign coffees to answer residents’ questions for her because she is clueless and seems to have no interest in learning. Her lawn signs are on his lawn. Wake up is right. If you have friends who remain “on the fence” or think “she seems nice” or “are looking for a change,” please wake THEM up and make sure they vote to re-elect Susan Knudsen and Mike Sedon on May 8. We must not elect either of his picks, but vote them out as we did two years ago and two years before that, or we are dead meat. If you would like to display lawn signs, write to [email protected] with your address in the subject line and they will be installed in your front yard promptly.

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All I see is candidate Harwin doing exactly what the Mayor did as a candidate: Cozying up to a guy that knows local politics so you can get elected. You all seem to conveniently forget that it was Aronsohn squiring around candidate Knudsen prior to her election. There is no question she relied on his network to win.

Saying they argued when they were both already on the council misses the point. She took his support and support from his network to get elected. He helped her campaign and Albano’s campaign, it was a two seat election and those were his two candidates. Once elected, true to her character, when it was convenient for her she started attacking him. Either that or she lashed out in an over reaction to some perceived slight, which would also be true to her character.

I grew up in Ridgewood and we always took pride in this being a “non-political party” place. Not since Paul Aronson saw this as a stepping stone to reverse his previous two failed attempts at running for Congress. He put a voting bloc together of three and basically ignored Susan Knudsen and Mike Sedon until the Village got fed up with the political games and tossed them out. Looking at Ms. Harwin’s campaign piece that arrived in the mail yesterday obviously same inaccurate smear campaign tactics as was the case before. So lets answer some of her charges:
1. Higher taxes – as we all have always knows, the Council has little control over Village spending – this is a school cost issue.
2. Nepotism – hiring by the police and fire department is by state law subject to exam and qualifications. The Mayor can’t do anything to influence this.
3. Fines to residents for leaves – this is a close one to my heart, as last fall we received a summons, as did everyone else on our end of the street. The leaf ordinance was passed by the previous Aronson team, not by Susan Knudsen’s administration. We contracted the Mayor and she could bnot have been more helpful researching the issue for us, talking to the contractor hired by the previous administration, and ultimately telling us what we needed to present to the Court – she told us we needed proof, what kind of proof and how to present it – when we went to Court all charges dropped.
4. The charge is made that Susan Knudsen is somehow responsible for storefronts not being filled. Funny how same problem at malls all over the country. Yet I see Amazon Prime trucks everywhere. We used to have TWO hardware stores in Ridgewood – now we go to Home Depot. The economy is changing from brick and mortar across the country and this means change for the Village too. Hard for me to fault the Mayor for a national trend, and did-honest for Ms. Harwin to do so.
5. My Dad was on the Planning Board in the 70’s and a parking garage was on the agenda then. The Aronson administration was in favor of a garage that would include retail space on the first floor to pay for it – how would more competition for Village merchants help them – so this was dropped. Next a mega-garage was proposed for the Hidson lot, over-hanging the sidewalk – an eye sore as well as an impediment for parking that was not paid for at the garage for church goers (not just Mt. Carmel as some have said but also the United Methodist Church also across the street. In the face of overwhelming upset the Aronson administration backed off on this as well. If we are going to build a garage (*which we need to do) this will involve a bond issue that will cost tax payers for 20+ years – so we want to do it right. Susan Knudsen has been working with the current Council to do it right, and attacking her for not just doing what previous administrations had been unable to do is again not honest.
6. The Harwin mailing also mentions a “failed valet parking experiment” – hard for me to blame the current Council when this was initiated by the Aronson administration.

I look at the two mailings we received yesterday – the Knudsen/Sedon piece noting issues being worked on and achieved, and the Harwin piece full of lies and blaming the current Council for things initiated by her patron, Paul Aronson. Not much of a doubt in my mind that I am voting for the honest candidates trying to pull our Village back from the mess created by the Aronson team, instead of the one who is spreading lies and backed by the previous failed administration. Don’t be complacent as often happens in non-national elections – this is important, and whether you agree with my comments above or not, get out and vote.

I know it hurts to hear your idol Susan is a hypocrite but just as a very specific, example, if you got a lawn sign from Susan in 2014 chances are the metal stand it was on came from Paul. Before you all say no, ask Susan.

No one said that anyone was my idol. All I was doing doing is to parphrase the old Saturday Night Life “Point/Coiunterpoint” noting inaccuracuracies in Ms. Harwoin’s mailing that were obviously deliberately mis-leading. Four years ago Paul helped Susan with her campaign. And then found out that she wasn’t a lackey. To her credit, not the reverse. No one is perfect, and I will be the first to say I am not at every Council meeting or taking noted on YouTube. But lack of honesty leaves me cold. Period.

Thank you, Peter Goodwin. Well said (except near the end of #4, where you said “did-honest” but meant “dishonest”).

Considering how many times it has been demonstrated that the mudslung items are untrue, I had an epiphany the other day: they don’t believe any of it and do not care that it’s not true. (Says a lot about an attorney and her rabbi husband.) They have taken a page from Mr. Trump’s book and Fox “News” and believe that if they say the same thing enough times, people will believe it. Trump admitted that he never really thought Obama had been born in Africa–but he paid for full-page ads in The New York Times to pretend he did. Those who complain of “fake news” are the ones perpetrating it. They and and they don’t care! (Says a lot about the NJ state government’s new disability czar.) It’s just a game to all of them. The result would not be a game for us.

People can be supported by people they like and trust only to learn that those people are not what they thought. That particular helper has fooled plenty of people before. It is to Susan’s credit that she recognized the truth and turned away. Isn’t this what blog posters have been begging Harwin to do from the beginning, on the assumption that as a newbie in town she didn’t realize whose claws she had fallen into? Yet weeks and weeks later, nothing has changed and that support has not been repudiated. One concludes that it’s all fine with her. This speaks volumes.